


Trash Vortex

by standalone



Series: Fucking Political Bullshit exR Coffeeshop AU [13]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: (also some fucking), Love, M/M, also essential, but it's for sure the start of something, efforts at unfucking, hope is so damn hard, impeachment's not an end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-16 19:23:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21041474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalone/pseuds/standalone
Summary: "You gonna fuck me Watergate night?"Enjolras contemplates this as he lies back to unbuckle his belt. "I might be too busy. But not right now."—“Sea State,”May 2017





	Trash Vortex

**Enjolras: **I know it’s stupid

**Enjolras: **stupid that it should be this time and not any of the fucking eight billion other times

**Enjolras: **but something’s happening

**Enjolras: **this could be it

He’s packing his bags as he texts; Lamarque was in town today, and she just asked him to catch the evening flight back to DC with her. 

**Combeferre: **I’ve been hearing murmurs all day 

**Combeferre: **Library staff’s in a respectfully restrained uproar 

**Courfeyrac: **Fuck yeah

**Courfeyrac: **Senator confirm anything?

**Courfeyrac: **I mean maybe she can’t say

**Courfeyrac: **Or you can’t say

**Enjolras: **Everything I know is that I’m going to DC rn and I might not come back till our fucking president is under impeachment 

**Enjolras: **The senator is stressing about being out here

**Enjolras: **But she’d made a commitment to an immigrant law center

**Courfeyrac: **And she takes her commitments seriously 

**Enjolras: **And she takes commitments seriously

**Enjolras: **Ha yes

**Combeferre:** Does R know you’re going?

**Enjolras: **He’s on this text

**Courfeyrac: **Jesus, you’re lucky you’re cute

**Combeferre: **Is she really asking you to stay indefinitely?

Enjolras is wrestling shut the zipper on his bag when the door flies open and he’s tackled to the bed.

“Really?” Grantaire demands, pinning him down and kissing his cheeks. “Really? Now? For real?”

“I think so!” Enjolras says. Atop him, Grantaire is insistent and hot and the realest thing; for these last few years in which our world’s constant hurricane finally started to swirl near enough that he could feel the rise and plummet and crash of its waves, there’s been Grantaire, anchoring him. But he needs to go.

“Shit,” he says, because in his pants pocket, his phone is buzzing the special buzz that is only ever Jeanne Maxine Lamarque.

“You gotta go,” agrees Grantaire.

“Am I a shitty boyfriend?”

“Who fucking cares?” Grantaire kisses him again. “I love you. And your country needs you.”

*

It’s the senator’s policy to travel economy, and her staffers’ policy to make sure she gets the relative privacy of the window seat. Backlit by the orange-red twilight outside, she thanks Enjolras when he passes over her drink—sparkling water with a squeeze of lime—and taps her plastic cup to his. 

“You’re looking troubled,” she says. Lamarque sometimes says you don’t get ahead in politics without knowing how to read a white man. Enjolras is always equally honored and regretful when she deigns to use this skill on him. After all, who’s _he_?

“It should’ve been something else,” he says. “Unapologetic racist nationalism? State-sponsored violence? The border—” The border is a horror. 

“That’s the problem, Enjolras,” she says. “Our country has never not been about genocide—or at least okay with it so long as it’s not politically expedient to protest.”

“Which is to say, as long as the victims aren’t whoever we currently consider white.”

“Right.”

“It had to be this, you’re saying.”

“We were never going to get him for atrocities. Our government is founded in atrocity. It’s _designed_ to overlook enormous violations.” She gazes out the window at the brown and green rectangles of American soil far below. “We’re predicated on violence and domination. It’s hard to appeal to our better angels when those angels are so distinctly anti-American.”

“It’s like that thing people were saying when Kaepernick started kneeling—that racism is so American that when people protest racism we think they’re protesting America.”

Lamarque chuckles, one little “huh” of amusement. “I forgot that one.” 

“But we _are _‘a nation of laws.’” 

“Precisely.” She drums her fingertips on her closed laptop. “I’m going to need you to hit all the angles at once, Enjolras. We can’t let go of the massive abuses of human rights—but they have to be in the background here. We’ve been waiting and waiting for him to mess up in the exact right way, and this is as good as we’re going to get, so we have to go in swinging.”

*****

“What if nothing happens?” Grantaire asks the next night.

“What do you—how?” Enjolras is flat on his back on the plush carpet of the senator’s waiting room, behind Chida’s desk, because it’s late and there’s no one here to care, and the carpet is so soft. His arms are tired, his back and brain and body are tired. His phone makes a tiny island in the carpet, linked by one thin cord to a wall outlet, and by another to Enjolras’s ears.

“What are the chances we can’t oust him?”

“Yeah, no,” Enjolras says. “That’s not what this is for. It’s not about getting him out. Nothing can get him out as long as enough disgusting people are willing to sacrifice any scrap of morality they might stand for if they could get a chance at power.”

“Babe.” Grantaire’s voice is low and scratchy. Raw. Enjolras imagines he’s been to the gym. Grantaire goes boxing a lot when Enjolras is away. Keeps him out of trouble, he says. 

“You know this already.”

“What do you think—” Grantaire cuts off with a grunt, then tries again. “What happens if—”

“Is that your shoulder?” 

Grantaire grunts again. “Just stiff.”

“Put some ice on it, R. There’s no shame in ice.”

“Ice is for infants and the aged.”

“Oh, fuck you. We’re all gonna be old by the time this storm’s over. Might as well survive it with all your joints working.”

Behind R’s grumbles, he hears the sucking sound of the freezer door, and the velcro strap pulling free from an ice pack. 

“You are worth preserving, Grantaire.”

“Gross. It’s my arm. You don’t need to get mushy. What were you saying about this impeachment? About why we should care?”

“What we’re doing, we’re calling these amoral assholes on their bullshit. Will it work? No. But also yes. The senator’s going to hold them up to the fire, and make them insist, sweating and yelping, that it’s not hot. And eventually, not now, but give it a year or two, that fire’s going to burn their goddamn houses down.”

“I fucking love it when you swear.”

“I fucking love you.”

“Uh, Enjolras?” someone asks from the other side of the desk, and Enjolras shoots up to sitting.

“Kristen!” he says. “Sorry, just a sec. R, sorry, I need to go.”

“No, it’s okay,” Kristen is saying, but R is already saying bye, it’s okay, and hanging up.

“Sorry, I didn’t know anyone else was still here.”

“Sometimes I get a drink with my sister after work, then, when I’ve had something to take the edge off, I come back here and face the worst of the emails.” She picks up the triangular nameplate on the desk, waggles it at him like a pointer. “But then there was this _person_, behind the _desk_? Like, giving a _speech_?”

“Started at the bottom,” Enjolras says from the carpet.

She replaces the nameplate, but backward. Its golden letters read CAROLE CHIDA, CHIEF OF STAFF. “You really shat the bed on your chance to work in a ‘floor proceedings’ joke there.”

“I’ll live.” Rising all the way to his feet, he shakes out his shoulders. “Just nice to talk to my boyfriend. Once I get here, I always forget normal life.”

It’s hot and damp out, cold and dry inside; both always feel a little like a lie. Everything about Washington is; spend enough time here, and the Members of Congress start to seem like actual people, not like they’re each ten million conflicting demands and needs and agendas stuffed into a tolerably telegenic human frame. 

* 

On a video-call from his hotel room, he talks Grantaire through a jack-off. Grantaire was not enthusiastic earlier this year when he got assigned a curation gig focused on blue jeans, but since then, he’s fully immersed himself in the intricacies of metal rivets and flat felled seams. Of course Enjolras didn’t _prefer_ Grantaire’s disappointment to this newfound ardor, but when their calls get too deep into the world of innovations in textile weave, he figures that’s as good a time as any to start talking sexy.

Once the jizz is cooling and their breathing has settled back toward normal, he says, “I don’t know when, R. So much new stuff is coming out each day. Not that that’s different, really; revelations have been leaking from this administration the whole way through, but—”

“Different.” 

“They’re going somewhere.”

“We finally got a bucket under the cow.”

“If that metaphor was remotely palatable, I’d stick it in a speech.”

“I’d like to stick _you_ in a speech.”

“You _just_ fucking came.”

“Yes, and.”

It’s good he’s alone out here, really; he’ll be up too late reading news feeds and Twitter and watching TV news with the sound low, figuring out talking points for tomorrow, when the senator’s co-hosting a town hall discussion with one of her most influential counterparts from the House. But Grantaire’s voice in his ear makes him smile to himself, happy and wistfully aware how much he misses him.

“You get that no one knows what’s going on, right?”

“Uncharted territory, et cetera.”

“Nah, but. I work in a fucking museum. Everyone’s got these fancy degrees, and _they’re _all in the full-on dark here. It used to just be Rahwa asking me for daily updates from you, but now it’s a whole thing.”

“Your proud supplier of Washington dirt.”

“It’s not just _about _you.” Grantaire yawns on the _about_, drawing it out. “It’s, like, basic civics shit. Almost like most Americans don’t know enough constitutional law to pass a citizenship test.”

“Go to sleep, Grantaire,” Enjolras says, smiling into the phone at him. “Thank you for being so damn good at reading a room.”

“I’ll read _you_ a—”

“Go to sleep. I love you.”

* 

“You need to go in blazing,” Kristen says. She is politely refraining, Enjolras notes, from mentioning that the senator’s House colleague, while intelligent and well-intentioned, and a close confidante of the senator since their freshman terms, lacks Lamarque’s signature fire.

“Too much heat will not fly,” Lamarque says. The lighting in the office is lovely this early in the morning, creamy and peaceful; the energy, however, is hectic with phones and quick coffees and too many voices and the omnipresent deadlines of the senator’s calendar. She inspects her coffee cup, confirming that the lid is firmly affixed before she drinks. “The time calls for pragmatism.”

“Pragmatic blazing?”

Enjolras, in one of the satin brocade guest chairs, lifts an eyebrow at Kristen. “That’s about the tone we’ve been going for.”

“I didn’t fall off the apple-cart yesterday,” says the senator. “If people don’t trust me yet, they never will. What we _need_, team—we need to figure out what these people want.”

At their desks, Chida and Darren are busy tallying the night’s voicemails while keeping up with the incomings. “Really solid support, Senator,” Chida says, typing hard on her keyboard while she listens to another voicemail. “No surprise. This guy here’s not feeling it, but he’s also calling you some unsavory names, so I think we can reasonably disregard.”

“Meanwhile, this guy says he can’t wait for you to vote the crooks out,” says Darren. “It kind of sounds like they think you’re voting today?”

It’s so hard to keep up, even for him, and keeping up is his job.

Every day, there’s more stuff hurtling into the newsfeeds, mucking up the waters. Bad on bad on bad, an oily churn so thick that the cleanup’s unending. This garbage island grows faster than even the old-timers could’ve anticipated. Still, the journalists and lawmakers plug away, diligent and single-minded.

Sometimes we have to say _fuck the scrubbing_ for a minute, let the filth accumulate for a minute, so we can breathe and plan and figure out a way to halt the influx of pollution.

“Look,” Enjolras says. “Do regular people even get what impeachment _is_?”

*

“Greetings, fellow Americans,” says the other congresswoman. She and Lamarque are seated in handsome chairs on a nicely lighted stage. An American flag hangs against the dark-blue drapes behind them; each wears a tasteful flag pin in her lapel. 

The small audience, as instructed, refrains from clapping. No one here is running for president. This is not the promo circuit.

“Thank you for joining us today,” the congresswoman continues as the camera zooms in. It’s always difficult for Enjolras to divorce his thoughts of her from him memories of the posh district she represents, where Enjolras went to college years ago. In person, she’s less pompous than Enjolras always remembers her, but that’s not saying a ton. “This is, of course, an inflection point in our nation’s political history. A moment when our tools, carefully crafted by the fathers of our country, allow the people a voice of power against corruption at the highest level.” Hidden in the wings, Enjolras permits himself a prodigious eyeroll.

“Before we move into your questions,” the congresswoman says, “we’d like to take a moment to clarify the process of impeachment—what it means, and what it does. Maxine, will you?”

“Thank you, Thelma,” the senator says, smiling just enough to look friendly, not enough to lessen the gravity on stage. In the monitors, she strikes a carefully calibrated balance of professorial and grandmotherly. “None of us take this process lightly. In the 230 years since our first president took office, the United States has impeached only two presidents. Neither of those presidents, Johnson nor Clinton, was found guilty in the Senate, so both were able to remain in office. There is a common but mistaken belief that President Nixon was removed by impeachment; in fact, President Nixon chose to resign his office before he was impeached.

“To put it plainly: impeachment is not a finding of guilt; it is a presentation of formal charges, much like an indictment in most criminal cases. It is the role of the House”—Lamarque gestures at her colleague—“to investigate and then to bring those charges, called articles of impeachment, against a sitting president; the Senate then”—hand to her own chest—“must try the case, and provide a judgment. 

“To convict and remove a sitting president, at least two-thirds of senators present must vote to convict. As I said, this has never happened.”

Of course they reviewed, but to hell with the fact that Lamarque’s law degree is older than Enjolras, she knows this stuff inside out.

“I hope that gives a clear outline of the process. We’ve been receiving your calls and your messages. We know that you are eager for answers, and we’re here to provide them.”

Lamarque graciously directs the first question, which is a call-in, to the congresswoman, who explains what she can about the evidence currently in hand and the ongoing investigation. “As Senator Lamarque said, the first phase is investigation. We need to be certain of the facts before we vote on articles of impeachment. 

“With that said, our president’s public behavior in the face of this inquiry is, itself, ample evidence of impeachable conduct. We—” Sensing a minute shift in Lamarque’s face, she pauses. “We will do all within our power to provide a speedy and fair resolution to this shameful chapter of American history.”

An aide in the audience will hand the microphone to the next speaker. From his spot in the wings, Enjolras watches on the monitor as the audience-member stands to speak. 

Holy shit. It’s Grantaire. Enjolras’s heart leaps to think it.

“Senator, like you said,”

Except no. 

It’s not. It’s just a guy with messy black hair and a white work-shirt with thin blue stripes like the one Grantaire still wears sometimes, the one he wore that first day Enjolras met him. It’s not his voice. And when the camera zooms closer, it’s not his face.

“We’ve seen tons of evidence the president might have abused his power. What does this mean for legislation he’s helped pass? Or for judges he’s appointed? Does our nation really allow the acts of a corrupt president to outlive their tenure?”

Of course the acts stand. Enjolras has discussed this with the senator a million times. But maybe it’s good for everyone else to hear it too—because if every cruelty can remain, the urgency to defang this thrashing beast becomes starker.

**Enjolras: **you watching this townhall?

**Grantaire: **yep

**Enjolras: **thought this person was you

**Grantaire: **hmm

**Grantaire: **guess there’s a certain similarity

**Grantaire: **but I mean, the glasses?

Enjolras knows Grantaire doesn’t wear glasses. 

**Grantaire: **missing me?

**Enjolras: **every day

Honestly, it’s a good thing Grantaire’s not here; if Grantaire _was _here, there’s no way he could throw himself so entirely, bodily into the mire. Because it’s true: Washington’s a swamp, and no matter how much corruption we drain out, no matter how often we insist we’re just birdwatching, no one comes here expecting their feet to stay dry. 

His eyes linger on that questioner once the camera pans back. His shoulders are too broad, and the shape of his hair is too intentional, and of course Enjolras has never _seen _Grantaire wear glasses; what was he even thinking? 

But a quiet little empty space inside him suddenly feels empty.

*

“Off-record here, team. We are witnessing what could be the nail in the coffin of our American experiment.”

Checks and balances mostly work. The wheels of government mostly move slow. But not if you blow up the levers and the axles. Is it stupid luck that we got this far without someone trying so assiduously to destroy the system from within?

“Or,” the senator continues, “it could be the grand affirmation that this country needs. If we survive a would-be dictator who his wields fundamental ignorance of our Constitution as a bludgeon, if our power is enough to hold him back, well, that will mean something. That will mean it works.

“It won’t be obvious or easy. It should be both. It won’t. It will be ugly and close enough that we panic.” She paces to the wastebasket, lifts the teabag from her mug and drops it, then paces back to her desk. “Sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

She sounds so matter-of-fact; it’s not an apology, but a condolence, the regret of a generation bemoaning the legacy it must leave. _I wish I had the power to lessen the pain_.

“I thought we’d do better,” she says. “The fact that we’re here, it’s unbearable. And yet, we bear it—because if we don’t bear it, someone worse will bear the whole abominable mess of it right down onto the people who are already suffering the most.”

Enjolras is taking notes on his phone. He’ll be drafting speeches late into the night again, he knows; there are radio and TV segments in the morning, and a funeral speech for the war-vet-turned-Beltway-insider who orchestrated her first four Senate campaigns. “Not a eulogy,” she told him when she asked, “just a couple minutes on everyday heroism.” And from there, she’ll be headlining a big-names fundraiser—“jokes!” she said, “lots of jokes, ’cause we’ll give money when we’re terrified, but we’ll give more if, at the same time, we remember we know how to be happy.”

He has a section where he saves words and phrases he can’t use now—or ever—but that deserve writing down. 

_It’ll be ugly and close enough that we panic. _

_I’m sorry._

*

A nice thing about spending weeks at a time in DC is that he gets to take lunch with the team. Often they order in, but today the senator’s hosting a private strategy session luncheon and asked her team to clear out. They’ve left one aide on phones; everyone else gets an hour out in the cool, sunny afternoon.

At a nearby bistro, Chida asks after Grantaire. Enjolras outlines what he knows about his latest exhibit, the one about blue jeans, Americana, and jingoism.

“Sounds like something the Smithsonian would stick on a pedestal.” She pauses, looks at him with affectionate appraisal. “Have you considered it?” she asks. “The two of you could just move out here.”

Kristen thumps the table in approval. “Heck yes,” she says. “Love you, love your man. Do it.”

“I don’t think that’s a thing we’re considering,” Enjolras says firmly.

“There’s an apartment open in my building,” says Darren, offering around his fries. “Probably no more than what you’re paying right now.”

“Again, not considering.”

“What if you just tell Grantaire,” Chida says, laughing, “_look, babe, we’re moving, I got us this great spot, it’s in _Darren’s building_, you work for the Smithsonian now..._”

“_Everything’s coming up aces_,” Darren adds.

“I’m just thinking that might come off as a little presumptuous,” Enjolras says. He takes a fry. He enjoys being in public with these people. They can’t talk too seriously outside of the offices, and that means that other than Grantaire, these are maybe the only people he knows how to actually talk to about things that _aren’t_ politics. He glances around the crowded restaurant, every table packed with Capitol Hill lunchers, and a hearty dozen or so more standing in wait near the entry. “Can you really tell me that if you went home to your girlfriend and told her—” 

“Oh no, the second I told her I was making life plans without her, I would be informed in no uncertain terms that I was no longer her boyfriend. But Grantaire’s an easygoing guy.”

“We’re all of us creatures of routine,” Enjolras says.

“He talks a lot of shit about DC,” Kristen says.

“He talks a lot of _shit_,” Darren counters, tossing her a grin. “Betcha he’ll go where you go.”

Maybe it’s true. But Enjolras doesn’t love the Capitol. He loves these Capitol colleagues, and the energy that bubbles up all around him whenever he’s here—but he’s only ever here in times of excitement or crisis (and when it comes down to it, are these states really so different?). He can’t see a life here.

“Oh my god,” Chida says. 

The crew at the door are shifting to admit another customer, a man with boisterous dark hair and piercing eyes, and even though those eyes haven’t spotted him yet, Enjolras is mesmerized.

It’s Grantaire.

From across the restaurant, they see each other, and it’s like what child Enjolras always wanted and never got from the paper cups and string—a fine, firm, vibrating line of communication that stretches to connect him to someone else. 

“Oh my god,” Darren says, punching Enjolras in the arm. “He’s here now? See?” He waves at Grantaire, who’s already on his way over.

Grantaire kisses his temple, quick and soft, and it is so definitely not enough.

Chida has rustled up a chair from the next table, and sets it next to Enjolras. Grantaire takes it. Enjolras can smell him. There’s a low tang of sweat, probably because he flew and was nervous and alone on the flight but made it here, and yeah, also, on that note, a hint of booze. Not usually part of Grantaire’s daytime smells now. Enjolras takes Grantaire’s hand and squeezes, hard. 

“You’re here?”

“And fucking ravenous. You gonna eat this salad, or what?”

Enjolras tears his eyes from Grantaire to flag down a server.

Walking back to the senator’s office with a to-go sandwich for Grantaire, he realizes he has not yet thought through any of the other practicalities.

“Got somewhere to stay?”

“My stuff’s at Eponine’s, but I figured you might know a place.”

He digs in his wallet for his room key. Grantaire’s look at that—like he’d fuck him right here in this concrete-and-banners boulevard. But he just takes it, slides it into his own pocket.

“I missed you.”

“Nothing’s as good,” Enjolras says, kissing him by the ear so he can take in the particular R smells of herbs and fresh-turned earth. “When we’re not together, it’s just never as good as when you’re here.”

*

Having Grantaire here doesn’t do a damn thing to make him less busy, but the knowledge that he gets to go home to him? Even if that home’s a blandly fashionable hotel room? It feels sort of like he gets to have everything at once.

He updates the tweet stream, queues up some posts for later, sends several different tailored email blasts, prepares talking points for tomorrow’s appearance on Maddow, but it’s hard to focus because he knows R is here, and he should really go check in on him.

Except that’s ridiculous; Grantaire’s an adult, as capable of taking care of himself here as anywhere, probably hanging out with his DC friends while Enjolras works. 

Enjolras sends a few quick texts. 

**Enjolras: **at hotel by 9

**Enjolras: **see you then?

**Grantaire: **fuck yeah

*

He’s only off by an hour. 

He forgot to stop at the front desk for a second key-card, so he knocks on the door, and is hauled in and immediately divested of bag and coat.

Coming back together after time apart feels, even in this too-cold DC hotel room, like the warmth of return. So much is rough and unsteady and uncertain—but the two of them, they love each other, and they belong together as much as their hands belong all over every part of each other’s bodies.

“God,” Enjolras gasps, jammed against the wall in an unbuttoned shirt and necktie Grantaire was too impatient to undo, the scrape of Grantaire’s rough jaw against his own making him shudder. R’s hand is in his hair, holding him back how he likes, while the other releases the catch of his belt, and then there’s heat and pressure on his cock. “Holy fuck.”

“Fuck, I want you.”

“Have me.”

“I wanna fuck you.”

“Please.”

It’s dark outside the window, spangled with the lights of buses and buildings and city streets. Grantaire hits the switch by the bed as he pulls Enjolras down, so that the dark falls across the room too, and bits of the outside light shimmer in onto the ceiling and walls.

He sucks Enjolras’s cock till Enjolras is twitching and bucking inside him, holding himself back—and then Grantaire moves a hand to hold him still so that he can lick at him, light and teasing, letting him cool down while Grantaire’s other hand begins to push into him. 

It’s a different way than usual, not that there’s a “usual,” exactly; instead of a finger at a time, Grantaire keeps his hand pressed together flat, a plane with uneven ending points, and as one finger enters his ass, others nudge against the outside of his hole. It’s destabilizing and exciting. It’s not long before Enjolras is pushing down onto it, trying to get more fingertips inside him.

There’s always parts of him that want this; even when everything else seems so important that it’s impossible to think about thinking about anything that’s not the greater good, he wants this feeling, this desperation for something so unthinkably good that, god knows why, he actually gets to have.

Grantaire feels huge pressing into him. He’s laughing into Enjolras’s mouth, both of them breathless, and Enjolras wants to laugh back at the beauty of it. In this precise moment, it’s too much for him to be able to laugh, but that’s fine. The laughter swirls around and over them, inside his head and above it, ethereal and unconcerned with the fickle vagaries of time and place. 

_I love you_, he thinks; his fingers clench into the muscles of Grantaire’s ass to pull him close. He knows his eyes must look frenzied, his hair a wild mess on the handsome white bedspread, and he knows that how he looks in this moment is not unconnected to the sparkle in Grantaire’s eyes nor the deep, driving pulses of his hips. 

“You fucking stunner,” Grantaire says, low and growly, making Enjolras’s nipples tighten up and his breath catch.

_What if Grantaire only loved me for my looks? _he likes to ask himself sometimes. He kind of likes the thought, actually. Such compelling ease. Because he’s not going to fix the world, god damn it, hard as he tries.

But Grantaire won’t hold the failures against him. Grantaire’s in love with Enjolras because Enjolras will always, always try.

His fingers slide up the long tight muscles of Grantaire’s back, tangle in his hair, hold his head where he can’t move it out of sight. 

“Come in me,” he whispers, looking at R’s eyes looking at him. “Don’t make me wait for it. Just fuck me now, fuck me till you can’t anymore.”

Grantaire smiles unevenly, an act Enjolras recognizes from the wrinkles that spring briefly into place around his eyes, then his lips are on Enjolras’s and he’s fucking into him so hard and fast that Enjolras can’t trust himself to match him, and just barely rocks up and down, holding on.

His cock’s trapped tight between them, wet from his own leaking and stimulated by the friction of R’s belly with its soft mat of hair. Grantaire tries to reach in, but Enjolras is so close.

“I’m there,” he tries to say. “I’m there, R, when you—”

Grantaire reaches down instead; lifting Enjolras’s ass just a fraction more, he slams into him once, twice, and then pauses—momentarily immobile, he gazes into Enjolras from this moment outside of time. Behind Enjolras’s eyes, the sky teems with life, curving through the air, hovering. Even though they haven’t got it yet, they have everything.

Then Enjolras’s muscles pulse once, pulling Grantaire in. Grantaire groans. “I’m here,” he says. “Here, oh shit, Enj.” 

He’s thrusting deep and slow, so full and ready, and Enjolras, full of him, is just starting to come between them when he feels that Grantaire’s coming too, and all of it feels like lifting effortlessly up and up into a hazy sky.

After, spread out on the bed, his body is still but still thrumming, which makes him think of a flock of shorebirds that have swooped down to rest briefly on the waves, their little forms rising and falling gently with the surf. 

Some time later, Grantaire’s fingertips stir lightly on his bicep. “So, this is very nice.”

The tone says he’s building to something, but Enjolras isn’t sure what.

“But?”

“But it’s,” he tugs at the covers where Enjolras is flopped over them. “It’s not what I came here for?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t like it when you’re gone. I mean. I don’t mean you shouldn’t be gone! I just mean, like you said, it’s not as good as when you’re there. I like to be with you, Enjolras.”

Will hearing this ever be anything less than satisfying?

“So anyway, I came here ’cause, well, I’m wondering do you have plans on January 20, 2021?”

Inauguration Day. Enjolras snorts. “Probably.”

“Right, absolutely, of course. Not trying to get in the way of that. But if things go to plan, I was thinking, it’s a Wednesday, maybe you could take a minute off? We could stop by City Hall?”

The thousand birds take wing. “I don’t know if—”

“It could be later,” Grantaire says in a sudden hurry. “Whenever. If we have to wait another four years—well, _that_ wouldn’t be fine, but the waiting, that’s fine.”

The soaring birds are bottlenecking in his throat. “Grantaire.” He slides his hand across Grantaire’s bare shoulder blades, down the ridges of muscle and spine. “Grantaire.” Pushing forward across the pillow, he reaches Grantaire’s face with his own. This kiss, always so open that of course it conceals secrets. 

But he has his own secrets. He has the hope that never really vanishes, even when he tells himself in emotionless certainty that hope is useless, that to hope is to court disappointment. He shouldn’t say this, but inside him, even if that hope is just a shimmering phantom on the horizon, it’s proof that the horizon exists. It’s proof of a _there_ that, at minimum, is not _here_. Grantaire is here with him, and he’ll be there too, and he has no choice but to give voice to his stupid, fantastical hope. “It could be sooner.”

Grantaire’s fingers settle into his hair. “I’m good with that.”

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this one feels particularly obvious, but if you're curious, you can find notes about the political events that led me to write each of these Politics! stories [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JbdI1DieYfdR0i2zc1mheugKqdnJzEQKSPJvIE8O734/edit?usp=sharing).
> 
> It'll never be enough, friends, but regardless, I'm keeping these fingers crossed.


End file.
